What does First B Jackson teach about transformation?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on transformation starts with what God is actually doing rather than what a person decides to do about themselves. In the sermon on 2 Corinthians 3 and 4, Pastor Ray traced the image of Moses coming down from the mountain with a face that shone, and then fading. Paul picks that image up and uses it to describe what the new covenant makes possible: not a glory that fades, but a process of being changed from the inside, from glory to glory, by the Spirit. The central verse Pastor Ray kept returning to was this: believers, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image. That transformation runs from the moment of salvation through the whole of a person's life, and it is connected in Romans 8 to the full arc of what God is doing, from foreknowledge to glorification.
The sermon on the Transfiguration pressed on the same Greek word, metamorphoo. Pastor Ray pointed out that when Jesus was transfigured on the mountain, the verb is aorist passive: it happened to him, God was doing it, Jesus did not do it to himself. What the disciples saw on the outside was the inner reality of who Jesus already was. That same word appears in two other places in the New Testament, and Ray used it to ask what genuine transformation looks like for ordinary people, as distinct from simply being better informed. He had opened that sermon by tracing his own life backward to a moment in second grade when he kicked another boy until he was spitting blood, a story told not for regret but to make plain that the Christian life requires honestly reckoning with who we actually are, not a sanitized version.
Both messages held transformation together with surrender. The law, Ray said in the 2 Corinthians sermon, is still necessary because you have to know the bad news before the good news can be good news, but the law can only condemn, it cannot save. The veil is only lifted when someone turns to the Lord, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, not legalism and not license, but the freedom of the Spirit. The Transfiguration sermon moved toward Communion as an act of surrender to that same process.
Taught from 2 Corinthians 3:1-18 · 2 Corinthians 3:18 · Romans 12:2 · Matthew 17:1-9 · Romans 8:29-30
The passage taught · 1 John 3:1
1 See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God! For this cause the world doesn’t know us, because it didn’t know him.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- October 2, 2022 He Was Transfigured Before Them Ray walks through the Transfiguration in Matthew, connecting Jesus's transformation to Romans 12 and the ongoing work of God in every believer's life.
- March 24, 2019 From Glory to Glory A Wyoming pastor traces God's glory from Moses' radiant face through the law and the cross, showing how believers are being transformed into Christ's image from glory to glory.
Mentioned along the way
- January 26, 2025 Saul Is My Chosen Instrument Acts 9 traces Saul's dramatic encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and his sudden transformation from persecutor of the church to proclaimer of Christ.
- December 4, 2022 The Word Became Flesh and Pitched His Tent Among Us Pastor Ray walks through John 1:1-18, tracing how the transcendent God became flesh in Christ, and shares three stories of lives changed by the Gospel of John.